Matthew 24:3

3. As he sat upon the mount of Olives We may suppose that toward the decline of Tuesday, of the Passion Week, our Lord lingered upon the Mount of Olives, and his disciples, perhaps in respect for his evident depth of grief, held themselves at a distance from him. But as he arrives at the point where the prospect of the city and temple is most unsurpassably gorgeous he takes a lonely seat. The disciples That is, his three special disciples, Peter, James, and John; and also Andrew, as we learn by Mark. Came unto him privately That is, they dared to put the question to him apart from the rest. Yet we may well suppose that, before the discourse itself was commenced, all the disciples gathered to hear its important announcement. Of the three evangelists who narrate the discourse, Matthew alone, we think, was present; and his report of it is by far the most complete and verbally exact.

Tell us In order to comprehend this much misunderstood discourse, we must first well understand the question which drew it forth. Matthew states it with most completeness. And as he puts it there are TWO questions: the first is a simple, and the second a compound one. The first is, When shall THESE THINGS be? The second asks, What shall be the sign of the two events, ( or one, as they may be,) namely, THY COMING, and the END OF THE WORLD? Here then are three points of inquiry; namely, THESE THINGS, THY COMING, and the END of the world.

In order to a full understanding of this most illustrious of prophecies, we require three things:

First, That we may be allowed to supply from one evangelist the omissions by another of important passages, and allow the parts so supplied to modify the meaning of the context which they supplement. Second, We must dismiss all self-contradictory double meaning in the words of our Lord. He spoke of momentous matters about which poetry deals; he described exciting events; but he spoke prose and no poetry. He delivered nought but literal descriptions. Third, We must make the meaning of the terms in the answer correspond with meaning of the terms in the question.

The main terms or points of the questions, as we have already remarked, are three:

A. THESE THINGS. The disciples ask When shall these things be? By this phrase in the question, and therefore in the answer, is clearly meant the events of the destruction of Jerusalem, of which he had just spoken.

He had just told them that the temple shall be totally demolished, and of the events attendant upon that matter they ask, When shall these things be? So in the discourse uttered an hour or so ago, (Matthew 22:36,) he had said of the selfsame events: “Verily I say unto you, all THESE THINGS shall come upon this generation.” Just parallel to this is the celebrated Matthew 24:34 of this chapter: “Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass till all THESE THINGS be fulfilled.” And so Luke 21:9: “For THESE THINGS must first come to pass, but the end is not by and by.”

B. CHRIST’S COMING was the second point of inquiry. There can be no doubt what it means in the question; and, therefore, no doubt what it means in the answer. They meant to ask when would be his literal bodily coming; and if our Lord did not play with words, he also meant by these words in his answer his second personal appearing, and nothing else. And the word PAROUSIA, which the disciples used, never in the whole New Testament signifies anything else than a bodily presence. And the destruction of Jerusalem is never implied by that term. Nor is Christ ever represented as coming at the destruction of Jerusalem. In every instance, therefore, where the coming of our Lord is spoken of in this discourse, whether in the noun or verb form, common sense plainly dictates that the meaning should be the same, and the same as its meaning in the question, namely, the personal coming of our Lord at his second advent.

C. THE END. The disciples plainly ask about the END of the world. This our Lord plainly teaches will take place at his second advent, or PAROUSIA. So the disciples imply. The same common sense suggests, that in each of the cases where the word occurs, it should mean the end of the world at the judgment day.

With these postulates, we hope to clear this discourse of all artificial obscurities.